“Why, all the boys’ would look hard when you walked down the street, then laugh.

“You’re a head turner.

“But, that’s no way to get yourself a date tonight.”

His patronizing tone only made her angrier.

“I said a flattop,” she said, her brown eyes flashing.

“Is this a place where the customer doesn’t get what she wants?”

“Oh,” he said smiling but serious, taken back by her courage, “you’ll get just what you asked for.”

He walked over to the counter, took the big black pair of clippers off a hook and flipped the switch.

She stirred a little in the chair.

Maybe she’d been rash, foolish, to let her anger control her mouth.

He moved behind her as she watched in the mirror.

“One real “man’s flattop”,” he leered, emphasizing “man’s”.

When he got behind her he roughly put his left hand on her chestnut tresses and pushed her head forward.

She could see nothing but the striped cape.

The clippers chattered a high pitch sound, rumbling road behind her ears.

She swallowed hard but tried to disguise it.

She was trembling but she couldn’t let him feel the fear.

He said nothing, just took the clippers and started running up her nape.

The steel teeth vibrated against the sensitive spot in the center of her neck as she felt the cool air rush in behind them. A shudder ran from her soft nape down to her loins, already moistened with terror, anticipation and sheer arousal.

He worked quickly, uttering a grunt of satisfaction as he finished the back and moved to her right side.

She still could see nothing.

Hair fell in the cape over her shoulders, tumbling down over her breasts and between her legs.

With her chin on her chest she watched her lap fill with limp, lank tresses, some sliding off and down on to the linoleum floor.

Though she saw nothing of the result with her eyes focused so firmly upon her knees, feet and floor, she could feel the liberating, arousing coolness grow.

At her right ear, he placed the clippers above her cheek and moved it straight up.

She watched now, her head freed to stare in the mirror.

Gasping in wonder, horror, and thrall as the chestnut beauty she’d had since she was thirteen peeled away without a complaint, revealing a startling nude whiteness.

He was shaving her bald!

She blew an itchy, fuzzy hair off her cheek and it floated down onto the cape.

“Uhhh, ” she stammered, “that’s pretty short.”

“Too, late to stop now,” he said crisply, smiling. “You wanted a real flattop.

“And, a real flattop means lowering your ears.”

He stepped from behind the chair to her to the left side. Soon cascades of chestnut were falling over her left ear.

As she looked in the mirror, her shoulders were covered in tresses, lying limply in gentle waves.

There was a stunning whiteness around her ears up to her crown, where the chestnut waves remained.

Like some kind of bad ‘Mohawk’!

A tear escaped her steely desire to remain tough.

She subtly reached up from under the cape to wipe it away, sending a sheet of chestnut tresses almost a foot long rolling down the cape and onto her jeans.

Her panties were beginning to soak.

The more denuded he made her, the more turned on she became.

She concentrated, storing every detail to share with her lover, who surely will be shocked when he walked in this afternoon.

But, “oh”, he would be pleased by how this haircut, this cool freedom, made her feel.

“Oh”, the possibilities!

She came back to the barbershop, from her erotic daydream with the click of the clippers being turned off.

“Now,” he said, “we’re getting there.”

He surveyed her, noting the moistness around her eyes, “No complaints?”

“Well,” she stammered, “I didn’t think…”

She stopped as he roughly grabbed her chin with his left hand and threw the switch ‘on’ once again.

“Hold still!” he commanded.

He took a big, oversized comb and lifting the long hair in front then with the clippers, sheared it off in one quick, brutal stroke, sending it falling before her eyes and into her lap.

The tears flowed now.

But, her arousal only increased.

She loved the feeling!

Working swiftly, he moved from front to back, practically mowing, passing the clippers over the comb, a rasp as the silver teeth clacked against the plastic.

With each pass, the outlines of her bare head emerged.

She wanted to reach up and run a hand but she couldn’t just yet.

He was still clippering, solemnly.

As he reached the back, she looked in the mirror and saw a soft field of tan wheat, uneven thanks to his roughness, but revealing.

Sexy.

She already imagined her lover’s hands.

Her nipples grew even harder, her arousal heightened.

If he only knew!

A small smile escaped her lips.

“Short enough?” the barber mocked.

“Yes”, she thought.

“Perfect.”

Moving to the counter, he pushed a button and lather flowed onto his left hand.

“A “man’s” finish,” he cracked sarcastically, spreading the warm cream along her hairline behind her ears and at the base of her nape.

At the feel of the soothing warmth, she practically lost it, pushing her head gently back into his hand.

Looking up from under moist eyelashes, she saw him pick up the straight razor, deftly flick it open with one hand.

Then, coming beside her to strop it one, two, three times with a loud whap, whap, whap.

Moving behind her exposed neck he pecked away at the lather.

The raw rasp of the blade on her stubble sent shivers down her back.

And, the meeting of cool air on her virgin skin as the warm lather was flicked away, was a feeling she wanted to savor forever.

Then, he was toweling off the excess lather and sweeping the cape from her with a big self-satisfied, typically foolish male smile that proclaimed he’s shown this feminist.

He’d put one over on her!

Or, so he thought!

She paused to stare in the mirror before stepping from the barber chair.

There was a different woman there.

One with a long slender neck, small fetching ears highlighted by a bare whiteness and a soft caressing field of auburn on her crown.

She smiled.

It was “sooo sexy”.

She could not believe it had taken months to work up her courage to walk through the door.

She ran her right hand over the top, left slightly uneven in his rough haste.

Then, down the stubble in back.

A stubble, she would learn later would define this as a “high and tight”, not a flattop, of the type favored by Marines.

“Don’t cry little girl, it will grow back nice and soft and wavy.

“In a year or so,” the barber said, recklessly thinking what he believed his triumph in what he saw, wrongly and stupidly, as the struggle to preserve a man’s enclave.

She smiled broadly.

“No,” she said, “No, it won’t.

“I’ll be back for a cleanup in a week.”

In the mirror, she saw for the first time a man, about fifty, watching and waiting for his own haircut, a strange grin on his face.

The barber said nothing, his expression blank.

He was too thick, too sheltered in his old world thinking.

To insecure to even guess at her enjoyment!

She sighed, pushing aside the sexual politics of this visit as the wetness in her jeans brought other, more vital thoughts.